Trade Finance Hole The U.S. Export-Import Bank votes to authorize up to $450 million in coverage to include agricultural commodities sold to Iraq. The official financing support may have become more critical as Reuters reports that commodity trade financing by banks is “drying up at a rate not seen in more than 20 years.” The report says 80 percent of global trade is intermediated by trade finance, but banks are backing away from supporting it because the business may not fit regulators’ interpretation of balanced risk. This means that either private trade finance must become more available or official credit lenders will have to intercede more. Trade Policy Shift U.S. trade legislation moves through the arcanely...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.